


Twist and Shouts

by moontyrant



Category: Captain America (Movies), The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Food Service, Bad Guys Made Them Do It, Deaf Character, Deaf Clint Barton, Fire, Fluff and Humor, M/M, Nick Fury Swears, Winter Soldier Bucky Barnes, steve has opinions
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2015-06-20
Updated: 2015-05-22
Packaged: 2018-03-31 16:43:09
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,308
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3985366
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/moontyrant/pseuds/moontyrant
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The most faithless of travelers never found the Overkill Café on the first try. It was a nondescript brick building, once a charred IHOP and before that a mom and pop diner that did not survive the first days of the Michigan-wide recession. More than once the owner, Nick Fury, would prowl by the windows and watch confused motorists idling in the parking lot. </p><p>“Look at this motherfucker,” Fury murmured to himself.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Twist and Shouts

The smallish town of Lapeer boasted such tourist novelties as the Orr Hardware museum, the Yaegr pottery gallery and a hub prison, but the real draw was the Overkill Café. Located conceivably on the way to historical Michilimackinac, and a scant hour from Frankenmuth’s eternal Christmas cheer, Lapeer was the kind of town people stopped in on road trips, often without forethought. It was the kind of place built on tax evasion and racism, with land made mushy by lake effect weather and flattened by generations eking out corn and soy beans for profit. Lapeer was as far from New York City as possible, if not geographically, then culturally. The streets did not bustle. The people greeted each other, if not with friendliness, then with shallow politeness born of industrious summers and long winters.

The people living in Lapeer were born there and simply never left, save for a select few who stopped in Lapeer on the way to somewhere else—anywhere else—and never made it out again. If a rest stop could become a town, then it would become Lapeer.

Lapeer had a pottery gallery and a hardware museum, but tourists on their way to other places did not stop to see them specifically, though they might walk along the quiet, cool corridors and admire pieces of rough-and-tumble Midwestern history. No, the draw came from the Overkill Café. “This is that _place_ ,” roadtrippers enthused quietly into their maps. Unwary, hungry travelers might pull up reviews for restaurants in the area even as they turned off the highway and stumble across mixed reviews for a curious local dining establishment.

The most faithless of travelers never found the Overkill Café on the first try. It was a nondescript brick building, once a charred IHOP and before that a mom and pop diner that did not survive the first days of the Michigan-wide recession. More than once the owner, Nick Fury, would prowl by the windows and watch confused motorists idling in the parking lot. Surely a restaurant with such a colorful reputation would be more boisterous to the eye.

“Look at this motherfucker,” Fury murmured to himself. Maria Hill tucked a pen behind her ear and peered over his shoulder.

“D.C. plates. Think he got lost on the way to Bronner's?”

Fury snorted. “Could be.”

The dark stranger unfolded from his car after apparently deciding he was in the right place and strode up to the doors. Hill busied herself busing a table, leaving Fury to play host. “Welcome to the Overkill Café,” he said when the front door swung closed behind the newest diner. He plucked a laminated menu from the host stand. “Do you got a preference for where you wanna sit?”

“Bar is fine.” Fury could tell the man only just refrained from tacking a ‘sir’ on the end of his sentence, and he managed not to stare at the soft leather eye patch dominating the left side of his face. Fury walked him to the bar and laid the menu on the sticky bar top. “Your server will be with you shortly.” It was meant as a promise but it almost sounded like a threat. The diner smiled his most winning smile and watched Fury stalk away.

In the lull between lunch and dinner, the interior of the restaurant could be called subdued. It was the kind of place people did not take their children, especially when there was a perfectly serviceable Applebee’s down the street and a pizzeria on the corner. The bar was deserted and only a handful of tables were occupied. Sam Wilson scanned his menu, the whole front and back of it, wondering what kind of drinks the bar had to offer. The only entry he could find was a cheerful reminder in comic sans to ask the bartender about their daily specials.

The bartender in question sidled up to him and he looked up, and up, and up. The man looked more suited to the bouncer lifestyle than the art of bartending, with broad shoulders and a trim waist. He had blond hair and blue eyes, but Sam could read steel in his spine even as he fixed him with a big phony baloney smile. “Hi! My name is Steve and I’ll be your server today! Can I start you with something to drink?”

Sam blinked. “Um, water’s just fine.” Steve poured him a tall glass of ice water and set it on a little white square of napkin. “What kind of drinks do you have on tap?”

Steve pivoted to look at the blank cabinets, the unmarked bottles of suspicious liquids and the Out Of Order sign dangling over the beer taps. “Mm, this week looks like rum and coke and,” he crouched and squinted into a beige mini fridge, “Jell-o shots.”

He frowned. “That’s it?”

Steve’s mouth quirked. “That is a one-hundred percent increase in variety from last week. Clint would take people’s orders, nod, and make them a gin and tonic no matter what they ordered. When people started to complain he just turned his hearing aids off. So now we’re out of gin, but we just got some rum in.”

Sam grinned down at his menu. “I read online that the specialty here is saganaki and steak.”

“Sounds about right.”

“I’ll have summa that. Medium-rare on the steak, please.”

“Did you want that whole hog or half-assed?”

Sam searched his face for any sign that he was pulling his leg, because the term ‘half-assed’ didn’t sound right falling from someone as sunny as Steve, and in any case he didn’t know the difference anyway. However, he never got anywhere in life by choosing the half-assed option, so he said “Whole hog,” like it meant something to him.

 Steve scribble down his order, folded it into a tiny paper airplane and flew it into the kitchen. Sam pretended to watch a soccer game on the muted television over the bar, but a flash of red hair caught his gaze and he found himself watching a server dressed all in black waiting on a nearby booth instead. She was slight and she smiled sweetly at the older gentleman she waited on. “And would you like that whole hog or half-assed, sweetie?”

Sam turned his entire torso now to listen. “Half-assed, Natasha. What do you take me for?” the man laughed. “A man of my age can’t afford to go whole hog.”

“I think you’re doing perfectly fine for a man of your years, Mr. Pierce,” she quipped while she took his menu from him. She deposited his menu by the host stand, folded the order into a paper airplane and sailed it all the way across room, over Sam’s head, and through the window into the kitchen.

Lapeer, he decided, was a strange place.

“So where did you serve?” Steve didn’t bother looking up from the troublesome spot on the bar he was buffing out with a soapy rag.

“That obvious?” Sam ran a finger along the outline of his dog tags, still under his shirt because he felt naked without them. “I was in para rescue. Afghanistan. Two tours and then I came home, only to find I don’t really have a home to come back to.”

Steve bobbed his head. He tugged his tags out from under the collar of his shirt with a jingle. “Special Ops. Some Middle East but mostly Europe, if you can believe that. Came back to Brooklyn and found my roommate rabbited, and the whole neighborhood changed when I was away. Started running and ended up here.”

“Must be good to be back in the States, though.”

Steve smiled, but this time it never hit his eyes and he tucked his tags back to rest against his heart. “Yeah. I guess.” He worried the rag against the now clean table.

“It’s your bed, isn’t it?”

“Mm?”

“It’s too soft. In Afghanistan I slept on the ground, even used rocks for pillows but now I’m home.”

“It’s like sleeping on a marshmallow,” Steve told him. “I feel like I’m going to sink right to the floor.”  

“Veteran problems,” Sam chuckled, raising his glass. Steve raised a glass from the sink.

“Vet problems,” he mock toasted.

“Order up!”

Steve took the plate from the kitchen window and raised it with a flourish, his other hand whipping a grill lighter from his apron pocket. He lit the saganaki on fire with a grin and placed the plate, still aflame, before Sam. He took a small dish of lemon slices from the window and squeezed them over the goat cheese, now pleasantly brown and bubbly. “Steak should be done in a couple minutes.”

“Order up!”

Sam folded a piece of warm pita around his cheese and watched while the server named Natasha swept around the bar and took an innocuous plate of chicken and pasta. She moved like a dancer, all poised grace and purpose, while she took the food to Mr. Pierce. Sam chewed slowly and wondered if half-assed meant mild and whole hog meant spicy or something. Could you even do spicy steak?

“Order up!”

He supposed he would find out.  

Steve took the plate of steak and held it aloft with a question in his eyes. “Whole hog, right?”

“Yeah.”

Apparently whole hog at the Overkill Café meant lighting it on fire. Sam had never seen unfettered delight on a grown man’s face before, and especially not a man built like a brick shithouse, but something in the server Steve apparently loved lighting fires. Sam watched open-mouthed while he touched the end of his grill lighter to the steak, saw the way fire light played along the planes of his face, the steadiness of his hands squeezing fresh lemons over the fiery hell on his plate. In that moment his lips peeled back from pristine teeth in a head-splitting grin, all mischief, maybe even worshipful. He set the dish down and, almost as an afterthought, placed a tiny sprig of green parsley on the steak. “Let me know if you need anything else!” Steve told him, once again a cheery man instead of a devil, and he turned on his heel to visit the kitchen.

Sam cut into his steak and found it perfectly medium rare. It had a zing of citrus, and a smoky tang from being on fire, and it was the best goddamn steak he had ever eaten. He watched Natasha bus a table, and noted the unmistakable line of a grill lighter in her apron pocket. He suspected a certain kind of personality comes to work for the Overkill Café. The people here interviewed with an unsmiling man in with an eye patch, who no doubt explained there would be fire hazards in the job, where customers requested for their food to be set on fire in front of them. A certain kind of person serves nothing but gin and tonics to barflies, whether they order them or not, and then deigns to switch off his hearing aids when the complaints become too noisome.

Mr. Pierce set aside about a third of his meal to take home for later, and Natasha dropped a Styrofoam container on his table. “Anything for dessert?”

“Some lemon pie, please.”

"How big a piece? Small, medium or 'just fuck me up?'"

"Just fuck me up, dear. Thank you." She topped off his coffee and disappeared into the kitchen for a minute before returning with a piece of pie.

“God _damn_ ,” Sam breathed. The crust and canary yellow filling were standard fare, but the meringue was in a league of its own. Fluffy, white, perfectly peaked pie top towered over the plate, easily six inches high.

“It’s not as tall as usual. Phil still not back to work then?” Pierce asked as he tucked in with gusto.

“He just got married, actually. He and Clint won’t be back for a few weeks at least.”

“Good for them,” Pierce beamed.

“They deserve each other,” she replied with a waggle of her eyebrows. Pierce laughed.

Sam turned back to his steak and caught Steve wiping out a glass. “Anything for dessert?” the big pyromaniac asked.

“I saw you guys do deep-fried Oreos?”

“With French vanilla ice cream and chocolate sauce, yes we do.”

“If I ask for that, will you set it on fire?”

Steve fixed him with a pensive look. “I will absolutely set anything you order on fire. Mashed potatoes, cereal, orange sherbet, anything. I once set a mint mojito on fire because a guy dared me.”

Sam bit back a laugh even while Steve scribbled down his order and folded it into a little airplane. “You must be a real favorite with the fire marshal.”

“Fire fighters eat for free at the Overkill Café. We take our first responders very seriously.”

The Oreos were battered and deep fried and lined inside the rim of a large martini glass filled with ice cream, like pagan revelers around a bonfire, and the whole thing drizzled liberally with dark chocolate sauce, then sprinkled with Oreo crumbles. Steve did not light his dessert on fire, but he did poke three sparklers into the ice cream and lit those. When they were spent, Sam ate in peaceable silence with the soccer game for company. With the dinner hour drawing in, people began filtering into the restaurant, and no fewer than three times did someone order and receive a whole hog meal, to the applause and merriment of all. The intimidating one-eyed man had taken a post by the windows and was muttering “Look at all these motherfuckers,” under his breath when Sam’s meal drew to a close. Sam scraped his martini glass clean and left a 25% tip on the bar after he paid his bill. He walked stiffly back into the sunlight, overfull and thoughtful.

**Author's Note:**

> Lapeer, Michigan is a real place, with a real hardware museum actually located about 20 minutes away, in a little place called North Branch! Yaegr Pottery is also real, but exists in East Dundee, Illinois. The Overkill Cafe, sadly, does not exist as of the writing of this note.


End file.
